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What is collaboration and collaborative practice?

What is collaboration?

Collaboration generally refers to individuals or organisations 'working together' to address problems and deliver outcomes that are not easily or effectively achieved by working alone. Collaborative practice is now central to the way we work, deliver services and produce innovations. Collaborative relationships are attractive to organisations becuase the combination of effort and expertise produces benefits greater than those achieved working alone.

What is collaborative practice?

Collaborative practice involves community service organisations working together to achieve shared goals.

In the community services delivery system, collaboration is achieved when organisations develop mechanisms - structures, processes and skills - for bridging organisational and interpersonal differences, and together arrive at outcomes that they value.

Community service organisations generally collaborate to:

improve the quality or scope of service to their clients, and/or

provide administrative or service delivery efficiencies.

A continuum of collaborative practice

Collaborative practice can be seen as a continuum of relationships. The relationships formed between organisations can vary in terms of the formality of arrangements and how activities or functions are shared or integrated. Arrangements can range from informal agreements for information sharing, such as inter-agency or other network meetings, through to amalgamations and mergers, where a formal process fully integrates two organisations into a single operation.

Registrations are now open for the 2019 Community Legal Centres Queensland Annual Conference. A premier event on the community legal centre calendar, the conference is being held at the Grand Chancellor Hotel in Brisbane on 21 and 22 March. The conference is a fantastic opportunity to meet with a...

Griffith University invites you to two events as part of its research into engagement and impact in human services Advancing social work and human services research - engagement and impact panel discussion A panel discussion on researcher and industry perspectives about social work and human...

Brisbane City Council supports community, social enterprise and not-for-profit organisations by providing access to free professional advice to assist with their growth and sustainability. It established the Inclusive Brisbane Professional Advice Alliance in 2013 to provide pro bono high-level...

MDA (Multicultural Development Australia) and DiverseWerks are delivering an NDIS Sector Development - Provider Readiness (CALD) project funded by the Department of Social Services and supported by the Queensland Government. The project aims to increase sectoral understanding of people with...

Community Legal Centres Queensland, in partnership with the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, are surveying lawyers, frontline and intake workers, and social workers in Queensland about the impact phone or internet issues are having on their clients. The results will help shape the...

Today (6 February) is Safer Internet Day (SID) - raising awareness of staying safe online. Celebrated in 130 countries, SID is a great opportunity to engage the community in understanding how to make the online world safe for all users. In 2018, the SID theme ‘Create, connect and share respect: A...

Super early bird registrations are now open for the 17th National Volunteering Conference held 20-22 June 2018 at the International Convention Centre, in Sydney. The conference theme this year is 'Ignite, Invigorate, Inspire'. The 2018 conference will provide a forum for not-for-profit, managers of...

The National Disability Services (NDS) released their flagship report the State of Disability Sector Report 2017 in early December. Alongside the report they have developed a helpful factsheet with key statistics from the report. The report is based on responses from more than 500 disability...

The Queensland Government and the community services industry have co-developed the Partnering for the future: advancing Queensland's services industry 2017-25 strategy as a roadmap for proactively addressing changes and driving collaboration towards the industry's 2025 vision. To help your...

Elections are exciting and offer opportunities for real positive change, but how do you position your organisation to take advantage of these opportunities and avoid the risks? This webinar will discuss campaign and communications case studies from Australia and the UK and help you identify the...

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Are you looking for support in Queensland, or trying to find a service that meets your needs? Now you can search oneplace , the service directory hosted by the Queensland Family and Child Commission. oneplace is an easily accessible directory of community services to help Queensland families to get...

The collaboration decision support tool is designed as a resource to aid organisations considering entering into or forming collaborations to: (a) help to determine if collaboration is the most appropriate model (b) assess current capacity and capability to undertake collaborative action, and (c)...

The Community Resource Handbooks were launched by Volunteering Queensland on 12 May 2015. They consolidate the knowledge gained through Volunteering Queensland's community leadership work with more than 2,000 community groups over the past fifteen years. The handbooks are aimed at small to medium...

Information technology and online solutions can help your community organisation work better. ACOSS, Infoxchange and the Department of Communications have teamed up to bring you Digital Business Kits which give you the tools and information to do more online. Digital Business Kits are hosted on...

In March 2014, QCOSS produced the Rethinking Resources: Case Studies of Financial Resilience from Community Services report, in which community organisations from Queensland share how they are working to increase their financial sustainability. The strategies they employ include social enterprise,...

This is a very simple and easy to use toolkit that is filled with templates and guides to support your organisation to develop innovative and collaborative ways of working together. From developing a value statement, stakeholder engagement, business planning, SWOT analysis and many more. The...

This guide looks at client-focused service integration . Options and resources are provided that can assist organisations even without structural change to or between the service providers (government and non-government) involved. Other resources such as the Planned Support Guide provide a case...

This document outlines the the issues and factors you need to think about when working in partnership or merging with other organisations.
Download the Collaborative working and mergers document here .

This Research to Practice Note aims to improve understanding of effective interagency collaboration in a shared approach to child protection context and provides a brief overview of the relevant literature in this area.
You can access the document here .

The Womens Centre Cairns is a proudly feminist not-for-profit organisation that provides services to women and children at risk of domestic violence and homelessness. Drawing funding from the Department of Communities, Child Safety and Disability Services and Department of Housing and Public...

You may have seen the Network Spaces tab at the top of the Community Door site. You may even think Network Spaces is actually Community Door, a common assumption since the whole of Community Door used to be that green colour.

The competitive tender process for the Queensland government's new Social Benefit Bonds program has recently been launched, and the Invitation for Expressions of Interest (EOI) documents are available via...

At a time of significant disruption in the community services sector, many organisations are rightly focused on defining their inventory and consolidating their market position. The idea of collaboration or partnership in an increasingly competitive market seems nonsensical to many agencies....

With the impending roll-out of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) looming large in Queensland, some Not-For-Profit service providers in the Townsville region are expressing a feeling of isolation and of being somewhat disconnected.

Lutheran Community Care’s vision is aligned to making quality of life better for the clients we serve. In the light of this it is important to us that we can also quantify what has changed for the client since they have been using our services. Through adopting an outcome-based framework we seek...